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Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of
Titus Livius

Questions

What did Pericles say about the openness of Athens?

Pericles and Socrates both begin their speeches with accounts
of language. Compare and contrast their opinions of the comparative
power of speechand action.

How did Machiavelli describe a republic?

IntroductionCitizenship: Making
Government Work

Socrates left his life and faced his death with a question concerning
the value of life; fittingly, for someone who had faced his life
and the life of his city with endless questions. What may be surprising
about his life of questioning is how few satisfactory answers he
received; perhaps only one, and that one was simply to question.
To question and reflect on the meanings and demands of a persons
belief was for Socrates the only valuable course of human action
and the real meaning of political commitment. As he said before
the city during his trial, if he was to be forced to stop asking
questions or to leave the city he would cease to be himself. In
that light, for himself and his city, he questioned everyone about
virtually everything. For Socrates, the first political theorist,
and in order to follow his example of the proper role of the citizen,
this series of readings begins with a question: What is government?

How does one examine such a question? Possibly, by looking at what
others have said and done, much as Tocqueville looked at America
to understand democracy in France. In America, wrote
Tocqueville, democracy is given up to its own propensities;
its course is natural and its activity is unrestrained, there, consequently,
its real character must be judged. And to no people can this inquiry
be more vitally interesting than to the French nation, who are blindly
driven onwards, by a daily and irresistible impulse, towards a state
of things which may prove either despotic or republican, but which
will assuredly be democratic. Any understanding of government
and democracy benefits from comparison and contrast; and this one
is no exception.

Tocqueville looked elsewhere to understand democracy with both its
republican and despotic futures; collected here are writings from
a wide range of authors, locations, and themes in order to better
understand government, democracy, citizenship, and the state of
things. Total agreement about where to begin to understand government,
democracy, and citizenship is neither possible nor desirable since
the most basic question facing anyone attempting to study human
government is the very meaning of government. Some of
the readings, for example, confine the definition of government
to the rules of behavior promulgated for citizens by the nation-state.
In fact, this definition is probably the most common usage for day-to-day
speech, and the definition most in need of examination in the light
of alternative formulations. Some accounts of government challenge
this usage, in fact, some find this definition to be fundamentally
undemocratic in that it can be used to remove economic equality,
for example, from the concern of politics.

This units readings have been collected with several objectives
in mind. First, to demonstrate the remarkably diverse ways in which
thoughtful people have responded to the basic question of what is
government. By balancing classic essays, neglected historical documents,
and alternative accounts, these readings attempt to present you
with new approaches to classic concerns.

Aristotles account of the types and purposes of government
is one of the most commonly referenced definitions of government
and democracy. His explanation of the types of government serves
as a guide for many subsequent attempts to explain and categorize
human political organization. Much of his account appears again,
to new and different uses, in many later authors. The material collected
in this unit circulated and re-circulated through the thoughts and
writing of many others; for example, the Gettysburg Address by Abraham
Lincoln appropriated themes of Pericles and Thucydides, and Thomas
Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, lifted lines from
John Locke. This unit presents readings on which other units will
be built; defining themes and issues that will reappear in later
texts. Into the context of Lockes and Jeffersons similar
accounts of the value of work to political identity, for example,
is introduced the more particular and peculiar debate within the
United States over slavery and wage-slavery. This approach adds
historical flesh to the bones of abstract theory.

The readings introduced here establish a background for many of
the ideas taken to be essential to political society. This background
provides an alternative frame for the concerns of our political
life. It also facilitates the questioning of the basis of our own
understandings of society by illustrating their limitations when
they appear in other contexts. For example, Aristotles account
of the natural meaning of gender differences appears quite limitedeven
wrongto most modern readers. Historical distance, in this
instance, helps illustrate broader problems in the appropriation
of ancient models of social order.

Aristotle maintained, furthermore, a definition of democracy that
serves to orient later historical criticisms. Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
for example, calls Aristotelian accounts of government and gender
into question concerning the exclusion of women from participation
in the public life of democracy. She refused, it could be said,
to take for granted the common usage of democracy and subjected
the term to scrutiny and transformation. Other writers questioned
the ways in which the meaning of government fixates on the nation/state,
they claimed that government (and perhaps democracy) extends beyond
the understandings created by the conflation of government and state.
Alexis de Tocqueville, a nineteenth-century political observer and
philosopher, reminds us of the value of examining even the ideas
we are most attached to, such as democracy or equality. Like Socrates,
Tocqueville reminds us of the political action of intellectual reflectionso
that, like Socrates, we can lead our lives with questions more than
answers.